Gendered Words

Sentiments and Expression in Changing Rural China

Fei-wen Liu

The first full-length ethnography on Nüshu - the world's only gender-defined and yet disappearing "women's script."

This book innovatively incorporates three forms of expression-writing (nüshu), singing (nüge), and oral history (life narrative)-to unpack the complexities and dynamics of women's sense and sensibility, and to further illustrate the dialogical interaction between voices and forms of expression

This book is informed by a sense of urgency to record the true face of nüshu in history before it is too late: to address nüshu's cultural politics and new poetics developed since the 2000s, as the local official system has gradually absorbed nüshu and naturalized its adoption of mainstream literary discourse.

Gendered Words

Sentiments and Expression in Changing Rural China

Fei-wen Liu

Description

Built on twenty years of fieldwork in rural Jiangyong of Hunan Province in south China, this book explores the world's only gender-defined and now disappearing "women's script" known as nüshu. What drove peasant women to create a script of their own and write, and how do those writings throw new light on how gender is addressed in epistemology and historiography and how the unprivileged social class uses marginalized forms of expression to negotiate with the dominant social structure. Further, how have the politics of salvaging this disappearing centuries-old cultural heritage molded a new poetics in contemporary society?

This book explores nüshu in conjunction with the local women's singing tradition (nüge), tied into the life narratives of four women born in the 1910s, 1930s, and 1960s respectively, each representative in her own way: a nüge singer (majority of Jiangyong women), a child bride (enjoying not much nüshu/nüge), the last living traditionally-trained nüshu writer, and a new-generation nüshu transmitter. Altogether, their stories unfold peasant women's lifeworlds and forefronts various aspects of China's changing social milieu over the past century. They show how nüshu/nüge-registering women's sense and sensibilities and providing agency to subjects who have been silenced by history-constitute a reflexive social field whereby women share life stories to expand the horizon of their personal worldviews and probe beneath the surface of their existence for new inspiration in their process of becoming. With the concept of

Gendered Words

Sentiments and Expression in Changing Rural China

Fei-wen Liu

Author Information

Fei-wen Liu is Associate Research Fellow and Museum Curator at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. She has conducted fieldwork in rural south China on the world's only gender-defined and now disappearing "women's script" known as nüshu since 1992. She has published in many flagship journals of the concerning fields: Journal of Asian Studies, Modern China, American Ethnologist, Journal of American Folklore, etc.; and has produced a nüshu documentary entitled Calling and Recalling: The Sentiments of Nüshu.